Patent office administration would strike many a person as a dull topic. In fact this is wrong, for it is an excruciatingly dull topic. Yet like many such technical topics it explains why our world is the way that it is. States need tax bureaucracies to collect taxes, otherwise they would not last long as states. Multinationals need patent offices to grant patents, otherwise they could not raise private taxes. They would have to find other ways in which to gain monopolies over medicines, chemicals, seeds and software.

The importance of the topic, along with the realization that patent offices had largely been neglected in the regulatory literature, led me to undertake the study. My focus was not on one office in particular but rather on the interaction amongst patent offices and in particular between developed and developing-country patent offices. The development effects of intellectual property rights have become a major area of study, but we do not know much about how developing-country patent offices administer the standards of patentability that arrive in their countries through various treaty processes.

Administering a patent system is one of the few areas of intellectual property over which developing countries have considerable sovereign discretion. Patent offices might be one place in which one might find developing-country resistance to the hegemony that the US, EU and Japan exercise over patent standard-setting processes.